In general, popes are rarely eager to set forth an agenda before the white smoke above the Sistine Chapel clears, as it were – the first six months or so of a papacy tend to be fairly quiet. The impatience to impose some sort of template on this current pope has more to say about our restive contemporary media (and, perhaps, our own short attention spans) than it does about Pope Leo XIV.
In keeping with this tendency, the initial responses to Pope Leo’s interview with Elise Ann Allen released yesterday have ranged widely: the pope “resists doctrinal change on hot-button topics” (Washington Post); “is concerned by ‘some things’ happening in the US” (CNN); “talks Trump, sex abuse scandals, LGBTQ+ welcome and China” (AP); “takes on billionaires, polarization and war” (NPR); “talks about abuse crisis, Trump, following Pope Francis” (CNS); and addresses “wage inequality, Elon Musk, peace and polarization” (National Catholic Reporter). The New York Times, seemingly eager to break free of the scramble, responded with a metacommentary: “Liberal? Conservative? Cubs Fan? Catholics Project Many Images Onto Pope.”
Nonetheless, certain conclusions may justly be drawn. While one should be cautious in making too many presumptions, as it is clearly the pope’s prerogative to set the agenda of his own papacy, this passage from the interview seems worthy of particular attention:
I think that synodality is a way of describing how we can come together and be a community and seek communion as a church, so that it’s a church whose primary focus is not on an institutional hierarchy, but rather on a sense of ‘we together’, ‘our church’. Each person with his or her own vocation, priests, or laity, or bishops, missionaries, families. Everyone with a specific vocation that they’ve been given has a role to play and something to contribute, and together we look for the way to grow and walk together as church.
As Leo himself notes, his words could be seen as undermining hierarchy and diluting the authority of priests and bishops. Yet he says clearly that this is not the case; he also addresses clergy who take it in this way, saying that “maybe your idea of what your authority is, is somewhat out of focus, mistaken.” He just as explicitly distances this project from any sort of democratization, saying that this is “(n)ot to try and transform the church into some kind of democratic government, which if we look at many countries around the world today, democracy is not necessarily a perfect solution to everything.”
But what, then, would genuinely constitute a synodal Church?
The word synod comes from the Greek σύνοδος (sýnodos), which is formed from the words σύν (sýn) meaning “with” or “together,” and ὁδός (hodós), meaning “way,” “path,” or “journey” – so, a “journeying together.” And indeed the Holy Father refers in this context over and again to “we together,” “how we can come together,” “to grow and walk together,” to “strive to walk forward together.”
Yet in a world so sharply and bitterly divided, amid the “polarization” that Pope Leo explicitly decries, how are we to find our way together?
It is easy to dwell on the differences of opinion, of world-view, philosophy, or ideology that prevail among individuals or factions among the faithful, on the one hand, or on the other upon the structures of hierarchy and authority that could be deployed to impose order. Yet in a more fundamental way, the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, and as such is an theological unity.
The 20th century priest and intellectual polymath Ivan Illich distinguished between “the Church as ‘she’” and “the Church as ‘it’.” Yet this distinction is more meaningful than the limited sense in which Illich framed the terms. For the Church is by its nature both Marian and Petrine, in a way such that the two are neither reducible one to another, nor separable one from another. Moreover, the Church was Marian before it was Petrine, and was in those Marian beginnings at and following the Annunciation, more perfect than it has ever been again; as Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote of that originary, Marian Church:
True, she was not institutional – only much later would Jesus call his twelve disciples and vest them with the authority to preach and dispense the sacraments – but then she was more perfect (“immaculate”: Eph. 5:27) than she would ever be again. The realized Idea of the Church comes at the beginning; everything subsequent, even ecclesiastical office with its sacred functions is secondary, if not unimportant, in comparison… in Mary, the Church is embodied before being organized in Peter.
This archetypal “holding” of the full reality, at once eidetic and incarnational, has a necessary ontological precedence, without relegating to its Petrine complement any less dignity. Indeed, it is the inverse; the dignity of the institutional element rests precisely in its consonance with a deeper principle. The meaning of the institutional Church as a unifying force depends on the deeper reality of the Church as a living unity in herself.
Another way of expressing this dynamic: von Balthasar cites a principle from Matthias Joseph Scheeben, “that the mystery of Mary and the mystery of the Church penetrate and illuminate each other perichoritically, that neither can be correctly situated and explained without the other” – Scheeben here making bold use of a term referring primarily to the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity, and secondarily, in its Christological application, to the hypostatic union of human and divine natures in the one Christ. Leaving aside the fountainhead of meditation implicit in Mary’s “co-extensivity” with the Church, the invocation of perichoresis testifies to a paradigm of total union among or between irreducibles. Theological unity means that individuals-in-communion remain intransmutable. Catholic understanding demands a “thinking in complementaries,” and ecclesiology offers no exception.
An authentic synodality – “an attitude, an openness, a willingness to understand,” as Leo puts it – must draw its sustenance from this Marian character. Balthasar, again, locates the “primary, all-encompassing truth” of the Church in her stance of “ontological gratitude, which both receives the gift and passes it on.” In keeping with this, the Holy Father is proposing, not so much the aura of awe and authority conveyed by the royal We in encyclicals of yore, as a Church of receptivity, “a Church whose main focus is not institutional hierarchy,” in which “each and every membehas a voice and a role to play.” This, as already mentioned, is in no way is a plea for democracy; it is, rather, a call to a humble and listening spirit. Democracy, after all, is a system for managing the concentration of power in individuals; what Pope Leo is invoking is a paradigm apart from power – or, at least, from human notions of power. Leo, by his testimony, hopes to offer “a true prophetic vision for the Church, today and tomorrow,” “what Francis said very clearly when he would say ‘Todos, todos, todos'” – a model in which no one’s individuality, conscience or gifts may ever be subsumed by the institution, but are rather honored and incorporated into the larger context of an oikonomea, a household, a family.
Considering, in this light, the pope’s words on “institutional hierarchy,” on the authority of bishops and of national bishops’ conferences, on the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, and on how he envisions his own role as pope may draw us closer to a unifying understanding of what he is proposing. For instance, on women deacons, Leo says: “Why would we talk about ordaining women to the diaconate if the diaconate itself is not yet properly understood and properly developed and promoted within the church?” Where clerical power, and therefore its attendant political power, is deemphasized, “space” is created for the unique gifts of individuals, over and against institutional conformity and absorption. This is the type of atmosphere which can be expansive enough to root each individual member in his or her own reflection of the infinite light of Christ, fostering the joy and gratitude from which ecclesial power, unlike worldly power, derives its efficacy and legitimacy.
Regarding bishops and bishops’ conferences, Leo cannot be seen as clearly favoring an increase or decrease of authority for one or the other, but rather as promoting ecclesial unity, and to this end avoiding some of the marquee headlines which have obscured the Church’s mission. His approach is above all preemptive of power struggles:
Today you won’t have the situation where a bishop on this side of the river is preaching ‘A’ and the bishop on that side of the river is doing something totally different. We come together and we try to look at the questions together, to make common policies or take common approaches given the area, the culture, the language that people are working with.
Leo is clearly intent on preventing, without injury to subsidiarity, any ecclesial entities – dioceses, bishops’ conferences, dicastries, nunciatures – from acting as separate and even warring fiefdoms.
It is notable that Leo went out of his way to include mention of his agenda to promote the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. I would also consider it worth mentioning that his penultimate predecessor, Pope Benedict né Joseph Ratzinger, treats of the history of the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople in his Principles of Catholic Theology. “The question,” Ratzinger says, “seems even more relevant when we consider that the situation of the Church prior to [the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople] was anything but ideal.” Both the historical parallels and the consistent unity among recent popes are worth examining.
In connection with this history, Ratzinger wrote that “the unity of the Church could not be achieved by political measures but only ɓy religious ones, that is, by awakening the unitive forces within the Christian faith itself.” Compare to this, from Leo: “I requested that [the Nicaea commemoration] become an ecumenical occasion to invite Christian leaders from many different Christian religions or Christian communities to all take part in this gathering at Nicaea, because Nicaea is a Creed, it’s one of the moments that before the different divisions took place, we can all still find a common profession of faith.” It is not through ecclesiastical policies, but through each individual’s personal confession of faith, that the Body of Christ is built up and true power is harnessed.
Likewise, in secular matters Leo is quick to distance himself from political answers. He rejects the role projected onto the Vatican, of mediator-by-default of international conflict, saying: “In one sense, I don’t see my primary role as trying to be the solver of the world’s problems. I don’t see my role as that at all, really.” Francis often noted that the Church’s mission is not to be “another NGO”; Ratzinger astutely observed regarding the 6th century that “a Church that has, to this extent, lost her inner strength is no longer of any political interest because no spiritual force emanates from her.” To resort to anything less than this spiritual force, to deploy the prestige of the papacy as a political player, opens the way to the kind of false Messianism that Christ refuted by his death and resurrection.
Leo understands this well: “Being pope, successor to Peter, asked to confirm others in their faith, which is the most important part, is also something that can happen only by the grace of God, there’s no other explanation.” And again: “… to be able to confirm others in their faith… that is the fundamental role of the successor of Peter.” Likewise, he adds: “My role is announcing the Good News, preaching the Gospel.”
Returning to Ratzinger’s analysis of the development of the creeds, “the new unity” which they inaugurate comes from “confession of the Holy Spirit [which] goes hand in hand, in this theology, with the theme of Church reform. Devotion to the Holy Spirit is… not a theological theory, but a search for the spirit of faith, a search for divine life and for the renewal of the Church through the Spirit.” Leo speaks of his office in the same terms: “The Holy Spirit is the only way to explain,” and describes synodality as “conversation in the Spirit.”
This brings us full circle, to a man evidently willing to be into his humanity, his vocation and his office, humbly and with gratitude and dependence, long before any notions of grand transformation – a man willing to live as a microcosm: “In a sense, symbolically, my first two months have represented a great deal of the kinds of conflict that the world is living in right now. Yet in the midst of that, I sleep well, I very much feel the presence of the Lord, the Holy Spirit is with me.”
Image: By Poznaniak / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 2.5, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=165022536
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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